When we household two people we transfer all the payment info to the primary (except for a few oddball cases where one of them is a life member and the other is not). Those have to be left so that they get dues notices at the right time.
However from some of the banter on this list it is clear that some "members/donors" either really have very specific acknowledgement requirements that are different from the way ebase normally deals with them, or the people on this list believe they have these requirements without explicitly asking the members/donors for a range of acceptible behavior. Perhaps some of the acceptible ones will match ebase. For some people you only have to point out what you can do easily at low cost, i.e. conform to the way ebase works, and they will be happy to save you the money of doing something special. I figure the minimum cost of making anything other than a trivial/configuration type change is a few hundred dollars. Clearly I am not going to do this for one $5 dollar contributor. For a small number of $1,000,000 dollar contributors, I would just flag them for special handling by hand (which they deserve anyway). My general experience is that the vast majority of people are sheep and happily follow whatever you do. But you really have to know your audience to make real decisions. I work with a hiking club. Hikers are much more informal than average. So we don't even use the Prefix part of names unless someone complains. This avoids us spending any time trying to guess whether Chris Smith should be Mr. Chris Smith, Mrs. Chris Smith or Ms. Chris Smith. The more formal one is probably wrong anyway because Chris's real name is probably Christopher or Christine and the formal one just makes you look silly. My membership is listed with my informal nickname and I am happy getting that back in all cases. For others they might be listed with a more formal name and that is fine for general correspondence like a schedule of upcomming events, but for a solicitation letter it pays to pull them out of the pack and have someone on the development committee who knows them hand correct the machine copy from Joseph to Joe and sign/initial it with someone who really knows them as Joe. However I automatically throw out solitication letters that use this trick from someone I have never met. Sierra Club does this all the time to me and I have never met Carl Pope. ------------------ Reminder to each recipient: To change your list account preferences, go to http://email.sparklist.com/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=support and enter the email address you used to subscribe to the ebase support list:: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- ebase - Relationship Management for Nonprofits, http://www.ebase.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------
